PERFORMANCE DEGRADATION ANALYSIS OF CENTRIFUGAL PUMP BY LONG TERM OPERATION

Nuclear power plant has a number of valve and pumps, which are operating at a high temperature–high pressure and radiation environment conditions. Nevertheless, it is important to maintain the reliability of the valve/pumps to ensure safe operation of the nuclear power plant. However, the aging of the valve/pumps by increasing of years of plant operation and the system transients due to the sudden load change are working the failures of the reliability of the valve/pumps. In this paper, an acceleration test apparatus was developed to secure the reliability of centrifugal pumps. And the performance change with the increase of operation time of the pump was experimentally evaluated by the acceleration test. As the operating time of the pump increase, it was confirmed that the pump efficiency and head decrease.